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Island Voices activist, Mary Morrison, has launched another fascinating project with Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath, The North Uist Historical Society, (with Berneray and Grimsay). The Island Voices project is delighted to host some very young film-makers’ work on our YouTube channel. Mary explains:

“Have we found the Great Auk Stone?”

“This bilingual film was planned, devised, filmed, edited and photographed by the Junior Section of our Historical Society, Comann Eachdraidh na h-Oige, forty children from P4-7 of Sgoil Uibhist a Tuath over the Summer Term of 2017. The final editing and translation was the work of Anna Black, the film technician trained by St Andrews ‘Smart History’ group, under the direction of Dr Alan Miller, and given invaluable technical support thereafter from local artist, Peter Ferguson.

We are very grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund, ‘Stories, Stones and Bones’ for funding this elaborate project, since it relied heavily on our team of outreach volunteers, working alongside the very helpful and tolerant teachers in the school. Each of the six township groups, having chosen a specialist area of maritime history to research, also chose a secret landmark from their area. The film was devised as a form of treasure hunt to be explored, either to test residents’ local knowledge, or to encourage tourists to explore the island.

It is intended to follow this up with a paper map, charting the places of interest the children chose to photograph, plotted as six different walks. It also might be possible in future to download each section of the film as an app if our mobile signals improve or we obtain funding for a set of geo-caches?

As well as this film, we have kept all the longer oral history interviews in rough edit form. The children elicited so much of interest from the tradition bearers they chose to invite, using their preplanned, shared group questioning. We feel the excellence of the work they have done deserves to be captured here in its own right.

As you survey this stream, DO REMEMBER THAT THIS IS THE WORK OF CHILDREN AGED 9 – 12!”

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Series 1 of the Island Voices videos first came out on DVD in 2007. The project has grown a lot since then in various ways. Everything is now online (instead of DVD); Series 2 (Outdoors, Generations, Enterprise) added greatly to the number of videos created by project staff; and community members and groups have got involved in creating learning materials themselves. Perhaps the one thing that hasn’t changed is that the greatest emphasis is still placed on trying to base any recordings that come out of the project on real island life. That can still be seen even in the latest series “Sgeulachdan Thormoid” and “Saoghal Thormoid”, in which the project recorded stories and conversations from Norman Maclean in his final years, after he’d settled back in Uist.

Support for learners

Island Voices started (with help from the European Union) as a scheme for giving simple support in using new technology to learners and teachers. So, from the start the project has been about developing skills in community members in creating and sharing learning materials. As there generally tends to be more material for beginners (particularly in Gaelic) than there is for people who want to progress on to fluency, the project placed an emphasis on more advanced materials – with a mixture of documentary clips and interviews with community members speaking naturally. That’s the kind of material available in Series 1 and 2, with additional support available through Clilstore which gives you an online transcript alongside the film itself.

Made by the community

After those series, the project changed its way of working. It wasn’t project staff who created the new materials, but community members themselves. You can see examples on the “Bonnie Prince Charlie” or “The Great War” pages – series that were created in collaboration with Stòras Uibhist and Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath – in which people like Tommy MacDonald, Mary Morrison and others made their own recordings for sharing on the project website. In this way the project obtained new stories at a level even closer to the community, and new people got a chance to get involved in the work and to develop skills.

Social media and other languages

The project started online on WordPress (for a central website) and YouTube (for the films). But then the Facebook page was added, to help with sharing information about what was happening in the project and in the community. There is also a Twitter account, and overall there are well over 3,000 followers now, who are spread across the world. From the beginning the project worked bilingually with English and Gaelic. But as things have grown and developed, other languages have appeared, such as Irish, Welsh, Basque and others. Once people start learning a new language, they may naturally develop an interest in bilingualism, and how you can use different languages together.

Norman Maclean

Perhaps Norman Maclean was among the quickest to appreciate this, and he was also one of the readiest people to record Gaelic stories and other materials. After returning to Uist he did some pieces for Series 2 to begin with. He also got involved in the Storytellers and Great War pages. But his “pièces de résistance” were the series he made towards the end of his life. The project was very fortunate to get the opportunity to record his voice while he still had the ability to tell his own stories in his own style (“Sgeulachdan Thormoid”), and then to relate his thoughts and memories of Gaelic life in Glasgow and the Islands in a collection of long conversations (“Saoghal Thormoid”). All these recordings are now available on the website under the title “Dìleab Thormoid”. There can be no doubt that this is a very special resource that will keep advanced learners and other researchers very busy in the years to come.

Natural spoken language

Although Island Voices was established for the benefit of learners, it has always sought to capture and curate the natural language of people in the community. Emphasis was placed on Gaelic – or English – as it is spoken, though there is also written support for those who wish it or may find it useful. In this way project users get a taste not just of the languages and how they are really used today, but also of the local island way of life in the multilingual, multicultural world in which we all live.

Japanese becomes the tenth tongue to feature in our Sharing Gaelic Voices theme. We’re grateful to the volunteers, principally from Waseda University, who contributed to this new version of A Gaelic Journey, brilliantly co-ordinated by Tony Newell. There’s a considerable linguistic distance to travel between any Western European language and Japanese, but Tony’s team have done a great job here, with special thanks due to Emi Sauzier-Uchida, our newest “Island Voice”, for her beautifully clear narration.

This is ground breaking work, not just for Island Voices, but also for Clilstore as we proudly present our first unit (6109) in Japanese on this powerfully flexible platform. The complex writing system presents new challenges for the developer, Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, and there may well be glitches – which he will, no doubt, be keen to hear about. Feedback is always welcome!

Agus chan eil teagamh ach gun tug an obair sin buaidh shònraichte air Gordon Wells, a rinn na clàraidhean. Mar a thuirt e ann an àite eile, “There’s plenty of laughter and entertainment along the way, of course, but it’s well worth listening to Norman for many other reasons than that: vividly recalled childhood memories of mid-Twentieth Century Glasgow and the Hebrides; open introspection on the community relations issues of those days, and their lingering effects; wide-ranging discussion of creative influences in music, literature, and popular entertainment; all brought right up to date with acute, and sometimes cutting, commentary on current affairs, but topped off with a generous commitment to the continued sharing of cultural gems. And all in language that I, as my mother’s son, can only describe as beautiful.” Nach e a bha fortanach gun d’ fhuair e an cothrom na clàraidhean seo a dhèanamh!

It started with a recent post to the Scots Language Forum on Facebook to see what interest there might be in recording Scots voiceovers to Island Voices documentaries. Alistair was the first to respond, and chose to rescript (and update) the popular clip about Tobar an Dualchais.

As usual, we’ve also created a Clilstore unit (5904) to accompany the video, so you can check any unknown Scots words in an online dictionary.

This is our first video in Scots. It may not be our last. Many thanks to Alistair for starting the ball rolling. Watch this space!

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From the beginning Guthan nan Eilean/Island Voices has been a “more than monolingual” project. In the early days the balance between English and Gaelic video production was deliberately kept strictly equal in terms of numbers. Naturally enough, that approach would not necessarily protect the project from criticism from either side of any partisan argument which presented language competence (or language resourcing) from a “zero-sum” perspective, in which anything that “Paul” may gain must be marked down as a loss for “Peter”. But that was neither our philosophy nor experience. We found technical “economies of scale” in putting together single picture sequences which could be used interchangeably between the two languages. Also, and perhaps more significantly from a language support point of view, in circumstances where contributors might be underconfident in speaking on camera in one of their languages, it was often the case that a run-through first in the other might be all the encouragement they needed to then repeat the exercise in their supposedly “weaker” tongue.

In later years, as community members and groups began to engage more proactively with the project and with less of a need for “prompting”, the division between English and Gaelic materials (audio and video) undoubtedly swung over markedly to the Gaelic side. In a context of creeping English language dominance in all aspects of community life, this may be viewed as an entirely understandable and justified attempt, by those with a local interest in “mother tongue maintenance”, at some kind of counterbalancing support for the “weakening” language.

All the while, the research/reports page has been accumulating a series of reports and articles that document the developing context in which the project has been operating, and/or describe how the project has responded to that context. The term “bilingualism” can cover many different meanings, and certainly deserves close interrogation whenever it is invoked in support of particular social approaches or policy proposals to do with language use or learning. That being said, this project has consistently maintained a positive stance on the potential benefits of engaging with more than one language. The 2012 British Council book chapter (p153) and 2016 Language Issues article, in particular, explore the development of this approach over the duration of the project in some detail.

In the broadest terms it means recognising the interrelatedness and interdependence of seemingly separate languages and communities, and seeking judiciously to strengthen or exploit these for mutual benefit. It is in this context that the “Sharing Gaelic Voices” theme has emerged over the past year or so, to the extent that a new page for “Other Tongues” has now been created on this site, where our videos in languages other than English and Gaelic, voiced by contributors near and far, are gathered in one place. No doubt, there are powerful forces at work and complex issues at stake wherever languages are in contact, and the production of a few extra videos may have little material impact of itself on a tangled web of interlocking competences, loyalties, and social and economic pressures. But even if we are just reminded for a moment that one person’s “mother tongue” will be somebody else’s “other tongue”, and vice-versa, then we may be contributing in some way to the development of a more open mindset and a willingness to question previously narrower, maybe even “monolingual”, lines of thinking, whether that be at policy-making or community level, or indeed within ourselves.

Worthwhile activity, then. But also fun! Any other budding voiceover artists out there?